Members Area Tutorial: Photo Manipulate a Nature Inspired Advertisement

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a nature inspired advertisement design. You’ll learn how to make a grass sofa, create a depth of field, perspective, blending, use brushes, apply text and more.

Final Image

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Resources Used In This Tutorial

Step 1

Create a new document and fill it with white. I use the size of 1300×1000 px but feel free to make your own. Hit Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+N to make a new blank layer. Press G to active Gradient Tool and choose Radiant Gradient with color #00436e and #5cd0f7. Drag a line from center section to the bottom to get result below:

Step 2

I want to brighten the bottom sides so I make a new layer, use soft brush with large size (350-400 px, it depends on the size of your document), color #a9d4e4 (picked from bright center part of this picture), opacity and flow about 35% to paint over these sides:

Step 3

Open cloud stock. I use Retangular Marquee Tool (M) to make a selection on this part and use Move Tool (V) to drag it into our main canvas, resize it to be much smaller and place at the top center:

Click second button at the bottom of Layer Pallete to add mask for this layer. Use soft black brush with opacity 100% to remove hard edges and blur the center with opacity about 40-50% to get a faded effect. You can see how I did it on layer mask:

Step 4

To add some depth to this picture, I blur this cloud part. On cloud layer, go to Filter-Blur-Gassian Blur and choose radius as 2 px:

Step 5

Make a new layer and take soft white brush to paint on middle section of cloud to make it a bit brighter. I change the mode to Soft Light 50%:

Step 6

In this step we’ll add a subtle rainbow. Make a new layer, load Special Effects for Gradient Tool, choose Russel’s Rainbow (Linear Gradient):

Step 7

Step 8

I use an adjustment layer with Clipping Mask to brighten this bird. Go to New Layer-New Adjustment Layer-Levels:

Step 9

Add bird 2 to the left of cloud after isolating him from background, blur him as we did with bird 1:

This bird looks too dark against the background so I brighten him with a Curves layer (Clipping Mask):

Step 10

I want to remove black parts on the bird wings so I make a new layer (Clipping Mask), use soft white brush to paint on these areas. I lower opacity of this layer to 70%:

Step 11

Cut out bird 3, position bird 3 at the right of clouds, blur him:

You can see that light on this bird does not fit background light source (from top center). The head and wings on the left should be brighter (these parts get light). To fix it, I use a layer (Clipping Mask), make Linear Gradient with default colors (black and white):

Set the mode to Soft Light 100%:

Step 12

In order to change light and shadow of this bird more clearly, I use a new layer, fill with 50% gray and set the mode to Overlay 100%:

Take Dodge and Burn Tool (O) , Midtones Range, Exposure about 30% to brighten the top head (Dodge Tool), darken the tail and right wing (Burn Tool). You can see how I applied this tool with Normal mode:

Overlay mode:

Step 13

Extract sofa and place it at the middle section of picture, downsize it: